Newbie question: Style changes not reflected in the document

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macula
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Newbie question: Style changes not reflected in the document

Post by macula »

Today I downloaded a trial of Mellel and I am investigating whether I could switch away from Word, which has been a bag of hurt, as I begin to write my dissertation.

I have a fundamental problem: Any changes I make to a paragraph style (or a paragraph style within a style set) are not reflected in instances of the style that already exist in the text. In order for the changes to be reflected, I need to move the cursor to the paragraph in question and select the changed style from the menu or the palette again.

What am I missing?

Thank you very much.
laup
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Re: Newbie question: Style changes not reflected in the document

Post by laup »

First, I think that the answer to your big question is "absolutely." Mellel is great for such scholarly work, especially if mated with Bookends. Much more pleasurable than Word.

As for your style issue, I wonder whether you have Update document styles clicked in Preferences/Open and save? Another possibility is that the text that doesn't change isn't in the style that you changed. For example, it could be in the default style, whereas you have created a new style. However this may be, if your text is in style, call it Test," and you use Style Set/Edit Styles, bring up the edit style-set pane, go to the Character pane, click on Normal, and then on the pencil at the bottom of the pane [OR if you double click on Normal] you will bring up the font-changing pane for Normal. If you change the Main font to whatever, the changes should occur as soon as you hit save for both this pane and the edit-style-set pane.
Paul
macula
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Re: Newbie question: Style changes not reflected in the document

Post by macula »

Thank you very much for taking the time to help.

I'm getting desperate here as it still doesn't seem to work!

What's particularly annoying and intriguing is that changes to the Default style set are instantly reflected; changes to a custom-made style set, however, which I constructed based on a duplicate of the default set, do not!

Could this be a Snow Leopard—related bug?
macula
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Re: Newbie question: Style changes not reflected in the document

Post by macula »

Well, it seems my style set database was corrupt. I duplicated the recalcitrant set style and the resulting copy behaved well… Then I tried to delete the original but it kept reappearing in my sets database. I wish I could reproduce this because it seems there is a bug at work. Unfortunately I cannot remember the sequence of events that led to the corrupt database.

Thank you anyway.
macula
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Bug confirmed!

Post by macula »

OK, I am sorry for the back and forth.

Actually, I am now pretty sure that there is some sort of bug involved.

Every time I use Mellel, after some time the program becomes unable to reflect my style changes onto the document. The problem can occur with different styles and attributes. For example, the first time I encountered it I was unable to change the line spacing of my regular style. The second time I was unable to see the footer width reflected on the document…

I truly love the design philosophy of Mellel — it only took me a few hours of playing around with it to realize that it would be just right for doctoral work — but glitches of this kind, if indeed confirmed, would be highly discouraging. One just cannot afford to be distracted by pagination issues while doing scholarly work.

My configuration: Macbook 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, Mac OS 10.6.1.

Any ideas?
rpcameron
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Re: Newbie question: Style changes not reflected in the document

Post by rpcameron »

What version of Mellel are you using? 2.6.1 was known to have some corruption issues under 10.6; 2.6.2 fixed those problems. Or, 2.7.1 should also include those bugfixes.

Also, are the documents you are having problems with created with a version known to have corruption issues on 10.6, or was every document created with a new version? You said you discovered your style sets were corrupt, but did you remove the old ones completely? Also, did you remove all of the old files from the time of the corruption? (~/Library/Application Support/Mellel/ and ~/Library/Preferences/com.redlex.Mellel.plist are the directory and file to be removed to ensure Mellel gets a clean slate.)

Perhaps a more complete understanding of your system and the steps used to create the problem will help us aid you in finding a solution.
— Robert Cameron
macula
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Re: Newbie question: Style changes not reflected in the document

Post by macula »

Thank you for writing back.

I use Mellel 2.7.1, Build 3. I had never used Mellel or worked with Mellel documents before, so this is certainly not a "legacy" problem.

Yes, I did clean all support, cache and preference files that are associated with Mellel.

Strange, isn't it?!
miles11
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Re: Newbie question: Style changes not reflected in the document

Post by miles11 »

macula wrote:Well, it seems my style set database was corrupt. I duplicated the recalcitrant set style and the resulting copy behaved well… Then I tried to delete the original but it kept reappearing in my sets database. I wish I could reproduce this because it seems there is a bug at work. Unfortunately I cannot remember the sequence of events that led to the corrupt database.

Thank you anyway.
I'm running OS 10.4.3 and I had the same styles problem early on, when I first upgraded to 7.2.1. I sent a bug report, crash log, and a problem file to the Redlers. Most of the problems were fixed with the 7.2.1b1 release. (At the time I had several Mellel / Tiger issues - the most bothersome was the dreaded "Document-Rendering-forever" bug).

Once I got the styles to work, I was finally able to delete the unwanted style(s). My style list is now correct and that problem has not reappeared.

I've used Mellel for years and it has been incredibly stable and trouble-free. As Mellel gets more complex it's understandable that we'll see some bugs with new releases. Thankfully the Redlers are relentless about tracking them down and squashing them. The problems will be corrected.
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